Getting Started Directory

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Here is a sampling of resources from the ‘Investment Opportunities’ section of the Full Directory. These will introduce you to the concept of aligning your money and investments with your values.

LOCAL BANKING

main_street_2 Invest where you live and strengthen your community. Dollar for dollar, community banks build stronger local economies and communities. Using them we can create positive social, as well as economic, change. In return, our dollars stay more local and create an economic multiplier effect. Here are two great resources to understand the opportunity and guide you in changing banks.

Local Banking top resources

green america break up with your mega-bank

Green America’s Break Up With Your Mega-Bank Campaign is helping consumers and investors create and strengthen healthy communities in the U.S. and abroad. As a growing number of people move away from mega-banks and invest in community investing institutions instead, they will help create jobs, housing, and social services in communities that need them most.Green America banking directory and locator

Check out the Full Directory now for resources to learn more about Local Banking, Community Banks, Credit Unions and more.

COMMUNITY INVESTING

community_investing-1 Economic opportunity for all. There are ways to invest and lend money to organizations that provided needed financing to individuals and businesses not served by banks. Many of these organizations offer business and financial education to their borrowers, which increases everyone’s chance for success.

Community Investing top resources

Calvert Foundation – Community Investment Note, since 1995, more than 13,000 people have invested in our Community Investment Note, which earns a financial return while economically empowering communities worldwide.

Green America: Community Investing Across America and around the world, many communities lack affordable housing, child care, health care, and jobs that pay a living wage. By putting your money into community development banks, credit unions, and investments, you’ll help people with low incomes lift themselves up economically and make the areas in which we all live more equitable and environmentally sustainable.

USSIF: Community Investing – A diverse, vibrant and growing marketplace of options exists for community investment, with varying financial returns and an array of community impacts. Our resource lists for Retail, Accredited and Asset Managers is an excellent place to learn more about community investment options.

Kiva: Microfinance – Microfinance is a general term to describe financial services to low-income individuals or to those who do not have access to typical banking services. Microfinance is also the idea that low-income individuals are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if given access to financial services. While some studies indicate that microfinance can play a role in the battle against poverty, it is also recognized that is not always the appropriate method, and that it should never be seen as the only tool for ending poverty.

Check out the Full Directory now for resources to learn more about Community Investing, CDFI’s, Microfinance and more.

SUSTAINABLE & RESPONSIBLE INVESTING

sustainable_responsible_investing_crop Green your portfolio – Support public companies that care about people and the planet. Larger publicly traded companies are realizing that sustainability goes beyond the short term bottom line financials. Their longer term viability requires value be placed on social along with environmental components of business.

Sustainable and Responsible Investing top resources

Social Funds – Features over 10,000 pages of information on SRI mutual funds, community investments, corporate research, shareowner actions, and daily social investment news.

USSIF – Find materials that introduce you to the field of sustainable, responsible and impact investment (SRI): an overview of the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into investment decisions; an introduction to performance and SRI; as well as fact sheets on the process of proxy voting and offering shareholder resolutions.

Green America: Shareholder Activism From dismantling apartheid in South Africa to encouraging equal treatment for gay and lesbian workers, from convincing corporations to address climate change to pressuring financial institutions to drop their predatory lending practices, shareholders around the world are using their economic power to encourage corporate responsibility. Shareholder votes on social and environmental issues are receiving historically high levels of support.

Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility – Shareholder Advocacy 101: A Primer on Active Ownership. Shareholder advocacy, also known as active ownership, covers a wide assortment of tactics used by investors to influence the companies they own on questions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Levels of advocacy can range from proxy voting in favor of shareholder-sponsored resolutions to direct engagement of management in investor dialogues.

Terms and Acronyms

CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility
ESG(F) – Environmental, Social and Governance (Financial) metrics
Shareholder Advocacy / Activism – seeks to change corporate behavior through proposing and representing resolutions at annual stockholder meetings
SRI – Sustainable and Responsible Investing, or Socially Responsible Investing

Check out the Full Directory now for resources to learn more about Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Shareholder Advocacy and more.

IMPACT INVESTING

Empower entrepreneurs who create a better world. Purpose driven companies & social entrepreneurs. A growing number of tools, channels, and groups to help facilitate investing in private companies looking to create social and environmental returns, along with the financial benefits.

Impact Investing top resources

Case Foundation’s working version of A Short Guide to Impact Investing — A basic primer to help individuals better understand how business can drive social change and create social impact. We’ve talked with hundreds from the impact investing community to create this document and now we want to hear from you.

GIIN – The Global Impact Investing Network – A 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing. The GIIN addresses systemic barriers to effective impact investing by building critical infrastructure and developing activities, education, and research that attract more investment capital to poverty alleviation and environmental solutions.

ImpactAssets 50: A Global Landscape of Impact Investment Fund Managers – ImpactAssets 50 is the first publicly available database of private debt and equity impact investing fund managers. IA 50 firms are selected to display breadth of thematic and geographic areas of focus and experience in order to best serve as a tool for investors. Our ImpactAssets 50 database profiles each of these 2014 fund managers in-depth and enables users to search for investments both geographically and by impact areas of focus.

Slow Money – Thousands of Americans have begun affirming a new direction for the economy. It’s called Slow Money. Inspired by the vision of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, published in 2009, the Slow Money Alliance is bringing people together around a new conversation about money that is too fast, about finance that is disconnected from people and place, about how we can begin fixing our economy from the ground up… starting with food.

Investors’ Circle – The oldest, largest and most successful early-stage impact investing network. Together with hundreds of angels, venture capitalists, foundations and family offices, we have propelled $172 million plus $4 billion in follow on investment into 271 enterprises dedicated to improving the environment, education, health and community. IC’s mission is to promote the transition to a sustainable economy by increasing the flow of capital to enterprises that are addressing social and environmental challenges

Check out the Full Directory now for resources to learn more about Impact Investing, Networks, Funds, Platforms and more.

BEYOND INVESTING

waterfall-simiple Non-investment ways to align your money and values. To achieve lasting change we need more deeply understand our relationship to money and all the ways we can use it as a force for good to benefit ourselves, society and the planet.

Beyond Investing resources

Relationship with Money – creating new possibilities
1. Anastasia Impact – Transforming Money and Meaning programs for women and millenials.
2. Healthy Money Summit (free virtual tele-summit)
3. The Logos of Money – to assist people with a better understanding of money, its role in our lives and our issues and concerns around money.
4. Making Money Make Change (MMMC) – annual 100-person gathering for young people with wealth who believe in social change.
5. Play Big – inspires and informs people with large capital reserves who seek to align their money more fully with their values.
6. Reimagine Money (RSF Social Finance) – Transforming the way we work with money.
7. Resource Generation – organizes young people of wealth who are committed to working for a just world.
8. The Soul of Money Institute – enabling people to relate to money and the money culture with greater freedom, power, and effectiveness.
Philanthropy
1. Bolder Giving – Give More. Risk More. Inspire More.
2. Charity Navigator – your guide to intelligent giving.
3. Social Venture Partners International
Consuming
1. Environmental Working Group (EWG) – Educating and empowering consumers.
2. Ethical Consumer – the hub of the ethical consumer movement. – UK
3. Green America’s Responsible Shopper – Your guide to promoting a responsible economy.
4. The Story of Stuff Project – We have a problem with Stuff. We use too much, too much of it is toxic and we don’t share it very well.
Crowd Funding and investing is a quickly evolving structure that facilitates people making direct private gifts, loans and investments to individuals and businesses.
1. The Crowd Café offers crowd funding research, resources and news.
2. Kiva
Personal Finance and Debt Reduction
1. Financing Life – create a roadmap to financial independence.
2. Take Charge of Your Card – move to a credit card that supports people and the planet, and gives you the convenience and benefits you need.
Local Economies, Sustainable Businesses and Social Entrepreneurs

Now Visit the Full Directory to access all of the sections and
hundreds of resources.

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